Book review: Mother's gripping story about son's OCD will move you to tears

Stolen Child: A Mother’s Journey to Rescue Her Son from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Laurie Gough (Dundurn)

When Laurie Gough’s father died in 2013, her 10-year-old son Quinn was grief-stricken, missing grandpa so much he cried himself to sleep each night for six months. That was just the first warning sign of serious trouble ahead for this family in Wakefield, Que.

Then, Quinn’s strange rituals started: Exiting a room by retracing his steps, but backwards; following one spoken sentence with an identical one, but backwards; taking notes in school and then erasing everything written; tapping his grandfather’s watch and photograph repeatedly; keeping his fists clenched all day. Quinn’s brain was telling him his bizarre actions would bring his grandfather back to life.

Quinn had developed obsessive compulsive disorder. The happy-go-lucky 10-year-old who loved to ride a unicycle, play soccer and climb trees had disappeared. Rational thought also disappeared. He couldn’t deal with school and had to remain at home trapped in a constant battle with what the family called “the OCD bully” that had taken control of Quinn’s life.

The wait to see a medical specialist in Quebec was pegged at two years. Laurie and her husband Rob put their work, their lives, on hold as they did everything possible to help their son. They read books, joined a support group, consulted psychologists, tried hypnosis and spent months at home practising a branch of cognitive behaviour therapy called exposure response prevention, in which Quinn was forced repeatedly to confront aspects of his irrational behaviour. The goal: The rational mind would overpower the OCD bully and realize that nothing would bring grandpa back to life.

“If I say ‘come back’ 10 times while I touch my watch, I think he’ll really come,” Quinn once, very seriously, told his parents. Clearly, the OCD bully was in charge.

There were brief periods in which Quinn seemed to improve. Then he would return to his strange rituals and start new ones, leaving the boy so depressed, he wanted to die. At one point, he replaced his grandpa obsession with another, this one that he would win the 100-metre sprint at the 2024 Olympics, if only he continued to engage in the various rituals.

Months passed and, finally, at Halloween, Quinn dressed up as a ninja warrior, went trick-or-treating with his Wakefield buddies and inexplicably returned home, like his old self, with a bag of candy and the beginnings of a return to normalcy.

Quinn’s shocking, gripping story is told in the newly published Stolen Child: A Mother’s Journey to Rescue Her Son from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Quinn’s mother, Laurie Gough, wrote the book.

Gough is a much-published travel writer and she definitely knows how to tell a story. This is a book impossible to put down. It will move you to tears and outrage at the lack of help the medical system seemed prepared to offer Quinn and his family. Quinn’s parents, at one point, feared their son would be cursed with OCD for many years and would have to be institutionalized.

Obsessive compulsive disorder is a complicated, baffling illness. For children, it is commonly triggered by some trauma in the patient’s life. For Quinn, it was the death of his beloved grandfather. Some people are deemed to have a genetic propensity to develop OCD and are just awaiting that traumatic trigger. The condition is believed by some also to be related to a natural blockage of serotonin to the brain.

There are promising signs that, in some childhood OCD cases, the trigger is a case of strep throat. That can be treated by penicillin. That was the case with another Outaouais family.

Around the same time Quinn’s problems developed, parents Suzy Wiggins Fournel and Martin Fournel of La Peche were trying to deal with what they called a two-year-long medical “nightmare” engulfing their five-year-old son Caleb who suddenly one day, as he exited his school bus, developed severe psychiatric disturbances, some similar to OCD.

The Fournels initially received little help from the medical community. Then they saw an American television program revealing that symptoms like Caleb’s were, in some cases, caused by a bacterial infection related to strep throat. After a year of being on penicillin, Caleb returned to normal.

Gough does not discuss the Fournel case in her own book, although she mentions Quinn being tested for strep throat. For some reason, the results were never sent to the parents.

Anyway, Gough felt Quinn did not fit the profile of a child developing (from strep throat) what is usually called PANDAS or pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder.

Cases caused by strep throat tended to develop OCD or other psychiatric disturbances overnight. Quinn’s symptoms developed gradually after the death of his grandfather.

Shortly after the Halloween in which Quinn’s OCD stopped, his mother asked him how the miracle happened.

“Mummy, it didn’t just go away in one moment,” Quinn said. “I had OCD all that night. I just wanted to be with my friends and to get candy more. The OCD kept wanting me to walk backward and count all my steps. I just pushed through. I just wanted to go out for Halloween.”

Perhaps there is a more scientific explanation as to how Quinn overcame OCD and immediately returned to school, to soccer and to his normal happy-go-lucky personality. But his mom will gladly accept the boy’s explanation.

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